A Fat Man Wearing A Bucket

Necromunda has a lot going for it. The games are short, the armies small, and the opportunities for conversion almost unlimited. As the campaign goes on, characters pick up new skills and new injuries, and if you're like me it's entertaining to model them onto the miniatures.

Take this guy, for instance. He's a juve (a weaker, younger fighter) with no fixed name.

He started off as a 40k chaos cultist with Frostgrave arms and a head from a Brettonian knight. I'm not sure why I made him like that, but the combination of stockman's coat and bucket headgear does suggest that he has modelled his look after the Australian bandit Ned Kelly, who famously made himself a suit of primitive armour with which to fight the police:

G'day, Dr Watson!

Anyhow, our brave ganger has now been in several fights and has racked up a range of predictably absurd randomly-generated injuries and abilities. He has the Marksman skill, which gives you a bonus when using a basic weapon, despite the rules preventing him using basic weapons yet. He also has one eye, which hardly suggests a career as a sharpshooter. This is offset by True Grit, which means that he's harder to put down, and a mighty two wounds, which implies that he's either a genuine hero or just really fat.

It seemed "sensible" to model these contrasting attributes onto a new model. I needed a larger miniature, although not a vast one. Luckily, one of the new Khorne warhammer models would do. Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy has changed over the years from a wildly imaginative style inspired by medieval paintings, to a look best described as "spare members of Lordi". I found something called a Khorne Bloodstoker on ebay. It looks like this:

Needs more skulls.

Out came the craft knife. I added hands from old chaos knights, a head from another Brettonian for that classic upturned-bucket look, and a coat that I sculpted myself with green stuff over thin plasticard.

And now, paint and dramatic lighting.

A bit rough and ready, but he'll do (and inevitably looks way better in real life). It doesn't come out very well here, but I like using multiple dark washes over silver for the armour, followed by silver for highlights and scratches. 

I imagine that the bucket, with its tiny eye-slit, represents our man's reduced shooting ability. I think that, while he was recuperating from his eye wound, his friends gave him an experimental drug to make his eye grow back. Unfortunately, it just made him grow generally, explaining his considerable size. Alternatively, he just ate a lot of crisps while he was in hospital.


In the true spirit of old-fashioned gaming, especially with orks, I shall name him Ned Killy.